Six Hours with The National

byJames FurbushonMay 6, 2013

The National, in collaboration with the Icelandic installation artist Ragnar Kjartansson, spent six hours inside a small geodesic dome in the courtyard of PS1 in Queens, an offshoot of the Modern Museum of Art, singing “Sorrow” non-stop.

BECAUSE ART.

“I like the tranciness of it,” Mikael Karlsson, a Swedish composer who lives in New York, told the Independent. “It’s like taking a drug that you know is going to do something good.”

Actually, this performance is mildly intriguing as an exercise in differentiation and repetition — what does a song song like four hours into playing it over and over again? — even if I have no desire to actually attend an event like this. It would make a fantastic video installation to stumble into in a museum, but attending the live even might get boring fast.